Monday, December 22, 2014

Off the Needles: Never-Ending Baby Sweater!

I'm totally mixing up my usual blog schedule from now til the end of year (consider this your fair warning!), which is why I'm sharing a finished project today instead of waiting til Friday. Over the weekend, I managed to finish the sock yarn baby sweater that I've been intermittently working on since October. October! I guess that's what happens when you spend the better part of two months ignoring something on your needles.

At any rate, it's finished and I think it turned out pretty well, although I probably won't be knitting the same pattern again. I used a free pattern on Ravelry and let's just say you get what you pay for: my first indication that this wasn't going to become my go-to baby sweater pattern was the vagueness of some of the instructions. I feel competent enough to fill in the blanks and figure it out myself, but I do find it a little annoying - if I wanted to do that, I wouldn't have been looking for a pattern to knit from in the first place, I would have just winged it.

My pet peeve is when a pattern doesn't tell you how to do something such as decrease in a specific way, but instead says "increase x stitches across the row" or something equally vague (I'm willing to kinda let it slide in a free pattern, but it really infuriates me when I come across it in a paid pattern). My second indication that this wasn't the pattern for me was the picot-like effect the instructions for the neckline decreases produced, which I'm not a fan of. It's something I should have just corrected as I worked, but for whatever reason, I didn't.

Despite these of my criticisms, I do think I managed to make a pretty cute little baby sweater with a very special skein of yarn I'd been saving, and it will undoubtedly look adorable on one of my friends' babies which will be making their appearance in 2015.

Thanks for stopping by today - I'll be blogging as usual this Wednesday and Friday, so I hope you'll find some time to come back and see what else I've been up to!